As Western civilization crumbles, it’s easy to forget that the errors which have ushered in a new dark age were sold to us as keys to a bright, shiny future. Progress undergirds the Death Cult’s moral myth in a manner similar to how salvation informs Christian teleology.
The Cult’s evangelists prophesied that technological advances like the microchip, the pill, and the internet, would give humanity the tools to build a post-scarcity, post-national, post-Christian world. Poverty, racial divisions, and in time, death itself, would be conquered by the march of science.
Modernism can be thought of as a grand experiment to see if science could survive cut off from the Christian metaphysic that gave rise to it. Government’s and industry’s disastrous response to what should have been a moderate public health emergency hints at the answer.
The declining state of consumer electronics and software brings the consequences of decapitating science home. Each new generation of smartphones lacks basic features and even removes previous functionality. Not that much substantive difference exists between the two kinds of phones besides price.
If any market epitomizes the false choice to which consumer tech has devolved, it’s computer operating systems. Windows users and Mac users once constituted distinct rival markets. Now, the latest version of Windows is a brazen Mac OS ripoff. Home computer users now have as many OS choices as Model T owners had color options.
The lack of variety might not be so bad if anything worked anymore. Instead, search engines spit out sponsored, censored results. Online content consumers are at the mercy of haywire algorithms whose corporate owners couldn’t fix them if they wanted to. Each new software update breaks users’ devices while increasing the extent to which they’re spied on.
Some might feel dismay at this retrogression trend. But others recognize it as an invitation to cleanse their lives of needless, even harmful, junk and embrace simplicity. Pitch the spying device in your pocket. Ditch the AAA mud genre for retro games. Go outside.
Another reason to take heart in the hastening technological decline is that the Death Cult bet all its chips on tech. Their combination of blank slate equalism and promissory idealism isn’t producing the micromanaged world they wanted. It turns out that replacing smart innovators with linear thinking diversity wasn’t the formula for a tech utopia. It was the setup for a Michael Crichton novel.
That’s not to say we’ll get off scot free. The Death Cult’s attempt at a totalitarian system will end like all their predecessors’. They’ll fail, but they’ll take millions down with them trying.
Pray. Prepare for chaos.
Mobile Suit Gundam meets Tom Clancy
You make some very important points. For similar reasons, I abandoned secularism for Christianity. The past six years have shown me that the atheist promise of liberation is illusory because in a materialist universe “good” is decided purely by force. I do not say this to dunk on atheists, merely to state my objections with the philosophy.
I wrote a similar piece on fairy tales here.
And even though Don’t Give Money To People Who Hate You is important, I think you meant to link a Combat Frame XSeed book based on the description you gave.
Praise God for the grace of conversion!
Hit the nail right on the head. For example, as much as I like The Expanse, the ending was unsatisfying, and the main reason is that the constant reminders that humanity is nothing more than a bunch of animals makes morality, and especially the morality of the heroes, incoherent.
… the constant reminders that humanity is nothing more than a bunch of animals makes morality, and especially the morality of the heroes, incoherent.
I believe that the “humanity is just another animal” idea is one of many ways modern culture tries to demoralize people into absolute obedience. If people think of themselves as worthless, it’s easier to control and influence them.
Rawle,
Yes. And explains why engineered moral panics are so much more common in the modern world. To reduce humans to animalistic behaviour rather than the rational imago dei simplifies the enemy’s delusion of control. But it’s tenuous, hence the ever spiralling lunacy to maintain control.
xavier
This is where “Science Fiction” was always destined to head, as it was merely 20th century materialist utopianism tied together with loose string. They can’t write truly happy endings, because they don’t believe they are really possible. They can’t even write tragedy because they don’t believe there is a higher plan or purpose to anything that happens. It’s all meaningless.
Only by taking the NewPub pill can we finally put that old failed framing of ideas out to the woodshed like it deserves. Bring back romance and adventure!
Brian,
You make some good points. For example, have user really benefitted from the loss of MP3 players or digital cameras? Clippy anyone? I don’t think so, and we need to reevaluate the Swiss army knife approach to gizmos. Single use devices have a place too.
I write my drafts with paper and fountain pens before I type them. I simply don’t understand why no one offers a writing surface for computers as an alternative/complement to a keyboard. Most graphic tablets content themselves to whiteboard annotations.
In any case, we need to return to a balance between analog and digital.
xavier
xavier
I started abandoning “all-in-one” devices when my Canon all-in-one printer ran out of yellow ink (or so the chip in the cartridge claimed; I had only done black and white printing since my last purchase of color ink so I was skeptical.) Not only could I not print in color, but I could also not print in black and white, nor could I make black and white copies, and I couldn’t even scan things. The whole device was disabled because the yellow ink cartridge decided it was time for me to make another purchase.
In the case of digital cameras, mp3 players, etc. they still exist but with basically no innovation and often less features than you would get a decade ago. But it’s still worth having one over a smart phone just for the ability to play music or take pictures without needing to bring a spying device with you, and so that you can break the habit of putting more and more of your life on a single device.
Every year, the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus builds a “disappointment PC” that combines the year’s worst or most disappointing parts, and they also release a T-shirt that memorializes the biggest blunders in hardware and software. 2021 witnessed a monitor and two cases that would spontaneously combust and a power supply that would explode under normal usage—and only one of the responsible parties, which was Swedish, remedied its combustable product in a timely manner.
Predictably, the one American corporation tried to fix its combustable PC case by keeping quiet about it and releasing a repair kit that didn’t actually repair the case, and only Gamers Nexus’s coverage of the problem caught the attention of the US consumer protection authorities. It also didn’t help that said American corporation had a reputation for meming at its customers on Twitter.
We have gained the whole world and lost our souls…and then also lost the world.
One of the oft-unnoticed side effects of this age is that we are no longer permitted to think for ourselves and have thus lost that ability. Want to know where we got Ethan “You Don’t Even Have to Think About it, Dude” Klein and the Branch Covidians who automatically follow CDC advice, no matter how incoherent? Consider the following:
School is nothing but fact regurgitation. No matter what the subject, the way to a good grade is to reproduce, verbatim, whatever has been said. Showing your work in math is no longer even to help the teacher find your error, but to ensure you have followed the nonsensical way math is taught down to the last decimal.
Get a job, and every rule you have to follow is set at corporate by people you cannot talk to and would never listen if you could, except they don’t make the rules, either. They let actuarial tables do it for them. For example, in aggregate, appeasing every angry customer is a net gain, which is why Karen always gets her free meal, despite rarely actually paying for something and the fact that everyone hates her (this also doubles as a humiliation ritual pushing learned helplessness). For bonus points, many of these tables haven’t been evaluated by an actual human in so long that you may be ruled over by software written by a dead man.
The stock market, movie release schedule, stock replenishment, everything is determined by some chart in some computer somewhere, and any attempt to change it can get somebody fired.
Did you know that if you run a DoorDash delivery and the customer got the address wrong, one or both of you has to call a phone bank in India before you can mark it as complete? Depending on the day and the distance, it is often quicker to just drive out to the wrong address to mark it done after giving the customer the food.
“How do atrocities happen?” people say. Well, here we are. What do you think would happen if Fauci sincerely told everybody we needed to isolate the unvaxxed in camps until they relent? What if he told anybody who tested positive should jump off a cliff? How long before pointing out this would kill you would be a bannable offense on the internet? How long before sick people were forcefully thrown off cliffs?
If the machine victory a la the Matrix were to ever materialize, there would be no war. One word from the algorithms and we would plug in voluntarily.
This is admittedly a tangential point, but since the Pop Cult is adjacent to and a subsidiary of the Death Cult, I figure it bears repeating. In recent years, I’ve been noticing a distinct trend within many fandoms (my direct testimony is from the Warhammer and Fallout fandoms, and I hear from others that the same is happening in the Total War fandom) towards increasingly unthinking brand-worship. Fanboys have always been a thing, but it seems that the idea that “you can’t complain about BRAND, or else you’re a narrowminded hater! Just enjoy the product uncritically, like we do! We’ll accept anything the gracious product gods deliver to us and be grateful for it!” has more currency now than it has ever seen in recent years. This strikes me as people increasingly using pop culture to fill the religious void in their hearts, because these attitudes would make sense if the subject were God, rather than a brand or IP. Of course, some of this may simply be due to the fact that critical fans probably left most of the really garbage IPs like Games Workshop years ago, and the only ones left are the True Believers.
I forgot to mention the seeming-assumption among said fanboys that an attack on BRAND is implicitly an attack on them for being stupid enough to be fans of BRAND, no matter how often a critic qualifies that you can like things that are bad. This would also seem to tie into the notion that they regard it as a religion, or at least something they tie their self-worth to, hence the demands to shut up and stop making them feel bad about being fans.
This is why when I deal with friends who are deep in the pop cult I simply say “sorry, I’m not interested in that” when they start ranting about their brand. Doing anything else is just walking into a minefield. There’s been times when I got asked “what did you think about the movie?” and replied something like “well the acting and effects were good, but the theme was muddled and none of the character arcs made sense” only to get a response that made me wonder if I was going to lose the friendship then and there.
When you say you aren’t interested you just get a lot of disbelieving “really? You didn’t watch it? But everyone’s talking about it!” But then you can move and discuss something more interesting.
Some people call this “toxic positivity”, which I think is a catchy and somewhat-accurate name for it.
I’ve seen this. Folks get so deeply invested in Brand(tm) that any rejection of the brand is rejection of themselves, because the devotion to the thing that has caught their interest, or even to a succession of the same, is a response to deep insecurity. They need other folks to like what they like. They may or may not know they’re practicing a religion in devoting themselves as they do. Perhaps a better way to say that would be that they don’t know they’re committing idolatry. They may be able to tell you what religion they profess, but dollars to donuts their religion hasn’t got any grace in it, or if it does, their nominal religion is not a means of grace in their own lives.
Approach the nearest Gen Y-ny and tell him that the Star Wars original trilogy is boring and non-sensical. You’ll discover that the cult of fandom already has denominations.
A good portion of the rise in modern Communism comes from a lack of purpose more than anything. Most of its adherents are modern secularists told by their Boomer materialist parents to work and get money so you can buy things to be happy. Of course when getting a soul-crushing job you don’t like simply enables you to buy internet subscriptions and sugary snack treats the question eventually arises of if any of this is worth it at all. I would posit they know it isn’t.
Is that what life is for? Getting a position as a cog so you can sustain yourself with bread and circuses? If it is, then the rise of Marxist thought makes a lot of sense. They have no concept of reality beyond poaching material objects for themselves and taking pills to get through the madness. Grab what you can before you come worm food.
What a depressing existence.
To be completely honest, I’m not sure how an entire generation, the Baby Boomers, managed to so steadfastly ignore reality and meaning for mindless consumption and selfishness for so long. All the younger generations are currently going mad and destroying themselves over this. It seems like the 20th century psyop didn’t do anything except destroy the foundations of what they were trying to build. It isn’t going to end well for anyone.
Some thoughts on why the boomers largely haven’t fallen to despair:
-Despite their constant complaints about kids being ruined by technology, the truth is that they have been raised by TV their whole lives. They may complain about younger generations being raised by TV/the internet, but it started with them. Even as a kid I noticed how at every gathering people from my parent’s generation would largely just watch TV (whether it was sports, news, movies, etc. the TV was at least on in the background.)
Add to this the fact that boomers have been catered to as a demographic in entertainment their whole lives (especially in comparison to Gen Jones and X, or Gen Y after childhood.) They didn’t randomly convince themselves that they were all civil rights champions who were responsible for reinventing music at woodstock and going to the moon. That’s the image that popular entertainment fed them.
-While consumerism is always hollow, you’re able to keep it going for longer if you actually get nice stuff. And the boomers did get nice stuff: nice houses, nice cars, quality movies and music, etc. And a functional (though declining) nation to enjoy it in. The millennials are the second most addicted to entertainment, but it doesn’t work as good as a distraction because the stuff they have is observably shoddier than the stuff the boomers had, and calling the nation functional has been a joke since the 00’s.
Boomers also got things for cheaper. It’s easier to write off college as “just some fun times” if you paid the tuition the Boomers got, rather than spending your entire working life paying it off like the millennials do. When you are spending your whole paycheck on debt, shoddy crap that falls apart from design, and subscription services for entertainment that is forgettable, it’s much harder to ignore how worthless all these material goods are in the grand scheme of things.
-I don’t fully understand why, but boomers have the lowest self-reflection skills of any generation. I think we’re all familiar with this phenomenon so I won’t elaborate on it.
-Outside of materialism, Boomers do have national pride. Now, it is usually a completely hollow pride completely detached from reality, and it doesn’t actually move them to protecting their nation. But they do at least like their nation, and as such they will also defend capitalism and democracy from a purely tribal perspective.
Around Gen X the education system started openly turning against the US and the west, and it was fully against it by the time the millennials and especially the zoomers went through it. As a result the younger generations have no pride or sense of belonging in their nation, their religion, their family, or anything beyond themselves alone (for those on the right) or their status in the woke hierarchy (for those on the left.) That is, even though a boomer will often in reality only live for his possessions and his consumption of entertainment, he can at least tell himself that he’s more than that. Starting with Gen X that becomes more difficult, and it is nearly impossible for Millennials and younger.
“Modernism can be thought of as a grand experiment to see if science could survive cut off from the Christian metaphysic that gave rise to it.”
Can confirm. Science, and physics in particular, has been on a rocketsled to the bottom since about 1980. ‘Dark Matter’, ‘Dark Energy’, ‘String Theory’, and other non-testable, non-falsifiable theories were early indicators that Science can’t survive without Christianity.
Regress harder, Science!
I was genuinely shocked the first time I heard that Quantum Mechanics is essentially permanently stuck between at least two (and possibly more) alternative interpretations of certain weird facts, and no possible way of deciding between them for sure exists, so it largely just comes down to the personal preferences of the majority of scientists which one is “right”. That seemed entirely unscientific, more indicative of post-Descartes modern philosophy. Dark Matter (and Dark Energy, which is just the same thing but even worse) is the very definition of an ad hoc idea stapled onto a theory to plug the leaks, and I am confident that one day it will be looked upon in much the same way as the Ptolemaic epicycle. Quite literally, it comes about because the theory states that the universe shouldn’t work the way it does because there isn’t enough matter in it, and instead of revising the theory they instead postulate a colossal amount of invisible, undetectable matter to make the theory work.
Gets worse if you scrape off the surface patina.
Magnetic fields in space without an explanation of how they are formed without electric currents, aligned spins, or anything related to accepted electromagnetic theory. “Frozen” magnetic fields in regions of space, even though that implies constant electric currents forming these quasi-static magnetic fields.
Materials picked up by cometary probes that couldn’t come from the Oort cloud, since they are only formed in terrestrial atmospheres with liquid water and volcanic activity.
Just goes on and on to the point of comedy.
Let’s not crack open high-energy particle physics. More jokes for later that way.